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Iran to dominate non-proliferation review
Some 190 nations gather in New York on Monday in a crucial review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that risks being overshadowed by the Iran nuclear crisis.
Some 190 nations gather in New York on Monday in a crucial review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that risks being overshadowed by the Iran nuclear crisis.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to head his country's delegation, but is still awaiting a US visa to go to the UN headquarters in New York, officials said.
US President Barack Obama has unveiled a series of disarmament initiatives even as Iran maintains its refusal to halt nuclear work that has drawn three rounds of UN sanctions.
The United States charges that Iran is secretly developing atomic weapons but Iran says its program is to generate electricity. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said Iran opposes nuclear weapons and is almost certain to hammer this theme in New York if he gets a visa.
There is concern the Iranian crisis could distract attention at the meeting of the 189 NPT signatories from making progress on disarmament and tougher monitoring of nuclear programs worldwide. The last of the five-year reviews foundered in 2005 over these issues and did not even release a final document.
Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all gone nuclear since the NPT came into effect in 1970. The original nuclear weapons states were Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
Iran is seen as a test case for the treaty, both because it resists UN demands to stop enriching uranium and because an Iranian bomb could set off an atomic arms race in the Middle East.
The United States is pushing for more UN Security Council sanctions on Iran but is running into resistance from Russia and China.
Washington had hoped to have a resolution before the NPT conference, which runs May 3-28 with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leading the US delegation. But the United States will now have to negotiate at the Security Council while the non-proliferation review takes place.
This could politicize the NPT debate, even if the US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said Wednesday that non-proliferation issues are "bigger than any one country."
Another stumbling block may be Egypt's insistence, backed by non-aligned states, that Israel should join the NPT and that there should be an international conference on creating a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. The 1995 review conference had called for such a zone.
Israel is believed to have some 200 atom bombs but neither confirms nor denies this. It says it supports the idea of a nuclear weapons free zone but insists there must first be a Middle East peace agreement.
The NPT is built on a bargain. Nuclear weapons states pledged to move towards disarmament. Other states foreswore the bomb in return for access to peaceful nuclear energy, such as for generating electricity.
Iran and many developing nations complain that the NPT bargain has broken down.
Obama came to office promising to restore US credibility as a state committed to non-proliferation. He outlined in Prague a year ago his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and has pressed recent initiatives.
Just ahead of the NPT review, the United States concluded an agreement with Russia on the first verifiable arms control agreement since the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1) of 1991.
The new START cuts the number of deployed warheads by 30 percent from levels set in 2002, specifying limits of 1,550 nuclear warheads for each country.
US officials are now banking on a successful NPT conference.
But it will be hard to agree on a final document, let alone one with specific changes, such as universalizing the Additional Protocol that allows for tougher inspections of a country's nuclear activities.
Ken Luongo, a former US Energy Department official, said this month stressed the US diplomatic push to take steps toward the NPT aim of disarmament.
But he added at a talk in Washington: "I'm not sure that the developing world, the non-aligned countries, will consider it to be adequate, because I'm not sure what they consider to be adequate, besides complete and total disarmament, which is just not going to happen."
